Dang rerwin, you are really earning your money. I think I'll give you a raise.

A note for those who come after. It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a team to build a modern Puppy. I average about 4 hours a day during the development cycle, but without 01micko we would have been nowhere. Shinobar, ttuuxxx, radky have all done heavy development duty. Zigbert with all of his fine programs. Many others. DaveS is the go to guy for Gnumeric and many other things now. rcrsn51 maintains the HP printer and scanner drivers and many other things too now. tempestuous has built the collection of updated drivers and has the knowledge and experience to tell me which ones to include. Now we see what rerwin can do. One thing is, different people have different strengths and experience and can find different problems. Maintaining the PPM, experimenting with new approaches such as using the i686 libraries, coordinating the bug fixes, all of that is a lot for one person--I am not complaining, just saying that without the team I don't think it would be possible for one person to make Lucid--I think the tasks would increase faster than they could be done and one person would just get farther and farther behind. And of course, we would be dead in the water without the testers and Bigpup to tell me when to take a break (among many other things)..

playdayz, 01micko,
I found a simple solution to the mplayer logging problem. The "really-quiet" option can be specified in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf. I added the following to the end of the "other settings" section:

Code:

#Output and status message control - suppress them.
really-quiet=yes

When I run pupradio the same as before, I get no status messages. This would eliminate the problematic messages for every invocation of mplayer. According to the man page, anyone needing the messages could run mplayer with "-noreally-quiet" or maybe "-quiet" if that cancels the "really-quiet" option. It probably would not affect gnome-mplayer (if it invokes mplayer and uses the .conf). . . . I have verified that gnome-mplayer can still play a CD without complaining.

That way, 01micko need not make any changes to pupradio for a fix. This seems to be the best fix for lupu.
RichardEdited_time_total

We have a later gtkdialog3 in 526 and we also have the i686 ffmpeg libraries instead of the i386 in 525--conceivably either of those could be the culprit.

I'd like to express appreciation for ffmpeg, a Swiss Army knife for media which I recently realized deals with .shn and .flac formats. Often having occasion to convert shn to flac (I surely question why anyone still encodes to shn) I discovered that ffmpeg is blazing fast compared to the shntool.pup(?) package I had been using (shntool is powerful and cool, though.) .. and this is on 525 (i386 optimised) so I want to express appreciation for the i686 upgrade. (Apologies-- I've been extremely busy and havent started into the 526rc yet..)
Reading your post encouraged me to test the xerrs issue, and I recalled having recently read about monitoring log files and found what I wanted:

so doing the "tail -f /tmp/xerrs.log" in one window, I proceeded to convert a .shn with ffmpeg.. now comes my first bit of bash scripting to present to the forum. Utterly minimalist, befitting puppy-- maybe y'all can recommend what to add to it to make it something worthy of distro inclusion (maybe just {test if there's no arguments, if not output the usage description which is now but a comment line..} ... I call it
shn2flac

Okay, so the report is, no growth in xerrs.log upon successfully converting a .shn... might note, though, that before going ahead I used Pmount to check that I had the space free on the target drive, and some definite spewtum appeared:

(but, this is a somewhat-hosed savefile I've been using for quite awhile.. the home partition ran out of space at one point and I get, for example, constant error msgs from firefox about possible stale nfs locks and such. Been meaning to start fresh and reinstall all my faves.. guess I'll do it with 526rc!) Hope this helps.

Btw, if folks wanna try converting .shn's at home, here's a nice public domain content page with good .shn audio:
http://www.archive.org/details/gd1968-05-18.aud.kaukonen.11796.shnf
(the .shn files are under the heading Shorten.)

#Output and status message control - suppress them.
really-quiet=yes
When I run pupradio the same as before, I get no status messages. This would eliminate the problematic messages for every invocation of mplayer. According to the man page, anyone needing the messages could run mplayer with "-noreally-quiet" or maybe "-quiet" if that cancels the "really-quiet" option. It probably would not affect gnome-mplayer (if it invokes mplayer and uses the .conf). . . . I have verified that gnome-mplayer can still play a CD without complaining.

That way, 01micko need not make any changes to pupradio for a fix. This seems to be the best fix for lupu.

Beautiful rerwin, 01micko is going to a happy man! More time with wifey after work. It makes me happy too, since it gets all the mplayer problems at once Live and learn.Edited_times_total

I'd like to express appreciation for ffmpeg, a Swiss Army knife for media which I recently realized deals with .shn and .flac formats.

str4y, We also have Menu -> Multimedia -> Ffconvert (courtesy of shinobar).

Just so you know, we use the ffmpeg prepared by Medibuntu--it adds some additional codecs. Also we are using the i686 versions of the ffmpeg libraries for the first time in 5.2.7--that should provide some performance improvement in playing videos.

I'd like to express appreciation for ffmpeg, a Swiss Army knife for media which I recently realized deals with .shn and .flac formats.

str4y, We also have Menu -> Multimedia -> Ffconvert (courtesy of shinobar).
.

Great-- that's tight. Thanks, shinobar! (I now remember having found that in the menu, after which I guess I proceeded to forget it was there.) Just noticed, though, that Shorten or SHN doesnt appear in the Audio codec pull-down list. (And while this list gets mentioned, I'd like to suggest .ape (Monkey's Audio, another lossless format) as well. I've owned a couple cheap-o Sylvania media players, which I discovered play .ape files! Unadvertised entirely, just came across it in the manual after buying. The lossless trader community has often discussed desires for .flac players, which are too rare, but at least this is a lossless format (which compresses about the best actually) on a cheap device. (Now they need to implement seamlessness track-to-track.. but I digress..) and over on the Video codec pull-down, I sought after .nsv - Nullsoft Video, having recently re-discovered those old Shoutcast channels, one of which has me happily consuming old TV shows lately.. I've been running gxine which renders them okay-- I'm unimpressed by the gnome-mplayer ELF (which I ranted about in a write-up for Slacko which I'll post probably tomorrow.)
Thanks again - keep up the great work.

I've a new version of right click option 5.2
which I should point out that it is strictly for Lucid puppy 525
or earlier puppies.

Here's something that 526 can use.
I changed the wording of shinobar's ffconvert
to be more useful and to keep the convert button higher
on the screen to help people with netbooks who have small
screens (600 pixels height)

..and I now have given Puppy a central structure
to help users store their data neatly.

Just have a little suggestion. In various places around the forum, you can find links to various VERY useful .pet(?), like the one that lets you use your Ethernet to share your Wlan connection and also the one that gives you Hiawatha/PHP/MySQL in one pacage. I bet here are others that can mention several more of these "hidden treasures" in Puppy Forum.

If people can nominate their favorite pets and then someone can collect them, then I can feature that collected list in LupuNews. This doesn't necessarily need to be done before release because I can update LupuNews anytime.

Thanks for the very good and positive followup. If you tell me a little about what kind of information you need about this, to make it look smooth in the QuickePet, I can start to think about that. Maybe they need Icons as well?

Its a possible solution, that i did not know of and did not try. Yet I doubt that "average Joe" will find the solution here in the forum, or know about, and there is the problem. Thanks anyway. Shall look it up here when i test to install something with a lot of dependencies. The point for me, was not to install Empathy, as it does not work anyway, due to some dependencies, but more to show the actual problem, that might needs to be resolved.